Alan Chikin Chow‘s videos are getting a glow-up. The mega-popular YouTube creator, whose mix of short-form and long-form uploads have brought more than 67 million subscribers to his personal channel, is opening up shop at a 10,000-square-foot production facility located in Los Angeles.
According to Taylor Lorenz of User Mag, Chow’s production hub includes 10 sets, each equipped with top-of-the-line cameras and lighting equipment. The creator and his 20-person team plan to use their new space to shoot all of Chow’s content, which he releases across channels on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
Chow was a little-known creator before the 2021 launch of YouTube Shorts, but his prowess with that vertical format vaulted him to the top of the YouTube charts. He often gets more than 500 million YouTube views per week and has made occasional trips to the #1 spot in our U.S. Top 50 rankings. Nearly four years after the launch of Shorts, he’s still going strong. At no point in the past year has his weekly YouTube traffic dipped below 100 million views.
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Though Chow’s Shorts catalyzed his rise to prominence, his production facility will primarily allow him to level up his long-form content. He has been getting millions of views per episode with a series called Alan’s Universe, which puts him at the center of dramatic high school plotlines, horror stories, and other pieces of genre fare.
Chow developed Alan’s Universe to bring his fans something a bit more serious than his “shower thoughts.” His target audience for his long-form tales consists of young women. While he sees YouTube as a platform replete with “boy content,” his goal is to create “something for the girls,” as he explained it to User Mag.
Chow also said that his production facility will allow him to grow Alan’s Universe into a multiplatform franchise spread across film, TV, live music, and IRL tours. “There’s a big democratization of how content is made,” he told User Mag. “All the power doesn’t rely on a few decision-makers anymore. Anyone with a strong voice and the know-how can create something that gets seen.”
Chow is not the only creator embracing that form of democratization. Since the shutdown of the YouTube Spaces that provided studio access to videomakers across the globe, some of YouTube’s top performers have brought their productions in-house. Dude Perfect has big plans for a massive studio facility in the Dallas area, while moralist Dhar Mann has enhanced his operation with help from MTV vet Sean Atkins.
Like those stars, Chow is enhancing his productions to compete with traditional film and TV in addition to other creators. He has noticed the rising popularity of film clips on YouTube Shorts and is giving his Universe more polish so that it can keep up with that trend. This former USC film student has pushed his lifetime YouTube view count above 48 billion. Now, he’s putting all of Hollywood on notice.
